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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/genocide-slur-israel-us-military
The Genocide Slur Against Israel Poses a Direct Danger to America
(Tablet) Maj. (ret.) John Spencer - The casual use of the word "genocide" to target Israel is also dangerous to Americans. If this ahistorical and largely evidence-free way of judging war is allowed to take hold in public discourse and harden into international legal practice, it will be turned on the U.S. and every other military that may have to fight and win in cities. Israel is the test case. If the rules are rewritten here, American soldiers will inherit them in the next urban war. The Gaza war is one in which an enemy builds a strategy around civilian suffering as the path to victory - a strategy of human sacrifice for political gain. Genocide under international law requires intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part. Without it, the charge collapses. When genocide becomes a label applied whenever civilian casualties are high, the term loses meaning. There has been no genocide in Gaza. Israel has not intentionally targeted civilians. Intent matters. Context matters. Israel has taken more measures to reduce civilian harm than any military in history operating in dense urban terrain against an enemy deliberately embedded among civilians. No other military has attempted civilian harm mitigation at this scale, over this duration, while under constant attack. Israel has conducted this war while facilitating an unprecedented scale of humanitarian assistance, medical access, vaccination campaigns, and civilian protection measures. No historical case of genocide includes a state feeding, vaccinating, providing medical care to, and sustaining the civilian population of the territory in which it is supposedly committing extermination. Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases, it is necessary. Moral seriousness does not erase the difference between deliberate murder and collateral harm. It does not treat the kidnapping and murder of civilians as morally interchangeable with deaths caused in the course of lawful military operations. If civilian harm alone becomes proof of criminality, democratic militaries face an impossible choice: Fight and be condemned, or refrain and concede defeat. Accusations of genocide being leveled against Israel are a weapon aimed at lawful self-defense. If lawful self-defense becomes impossible, democracies will have lost the next wars before they begin. The writer is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point's Modern War Institute.